What happened
Shares of video gaming platform operator Roblox (RBLX -2.06%) spiked by 16.4% this week, according to data provided by S&P Global Market Intelligence, after the company released data for September showing significant year-over-year growth in number of users and user engagement.
Roblox stock has been beaten down over the past year, and investors greeted the positive news from the video game company enthusiastically.
So what
Roblox said in a press release that its daily active users jumped by 23% in September to 57.8 million, and the total number of hours those users were engaged with the platform increased by 16% to 4 billion.
Image source: Getty Images.
With those solid results in mind, Roblox's management now estimates that its 2022 bookings will be in the range of $212 million to $219 million, an increase of 13% year over year at the midpoint.
However, not all of the company's metrics moved in the right direction in September. Roblox said that its estimated average bookings per daily active user (ABPDAU) were between $3.67 to $3.79, a year-over-year decrease of 8.5% at the midpoint.
The company noted that the strong U.S. dollar hurt its bookings. "On a constant currency basis, we estimate bookings growth would have been 17%-21% year-over-year and ABPDAU would have been down 2-5% year-over-year," it said in the monthly report.
Now what
Roblox shareholders have had a rough time over the past year. The company's users -- a large fraction of whom are kids -- are spending less time playing games at home now that schools have opened back up for in-person classes, and other options for entertainment that were off the table during the worst phases of the pandemic are now available to them again.
The company went public in March 2021 -- a year into the pandemic -- and its stock performed extremely well for most of that year. But with social distancing no longer providing it with a tailwind, and with the tech sector losing appeal to investors, the shares have fallen by 47% over the past 12 months.
While Roblox's September metrics encouraged investors, they'll get a better picture of how the company is doing when it reports its third-quarter results on Nov. 9.
